


Lessons in Tact

by Aesoleucian



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, also ensemble characters but who has the energy to tag everyone who appears in a story, not me, some not very graphic robot violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-07-07
Packaged: 2018-02-07 22:16:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1915899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aesoleucian/pseuds/Aesoleucian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Whirl gets beat up a lot, and totally deserves it. A character study, of a sort.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lessons in Tact

Swerve’s isn’t exactly crowded today, which is fine. Obviously the drunker and rowdier everyone is, the more fun you have, but semi-quiet sitting can be a good thing. In theory, you guess. 

You scan for anyone actually interesting to sit next to, and your optic alights on Brainstorm. He looks busy, so you can either annoy him or get you to show you something cool, or maybe both.

You slide into the seat next to him, loudly putting a glass of high-grade down on the table. “Hey, bud, how ya doing?”

Brainstorm looks up from his datapad, where he must have been messing around with schematics. “Oh, hey, Whirl! I’m working on this new kind of gun, as you do.” He seems to remember his own drink, which is sitting on top of his briefcase, and picks it up. “That’s the life of a genius. Finish a gun, start a new gun.”

“Wanna tell me about it? Unless it’s too top secret to talk about.” You lean back and take a sip of engex. “Actually, if it is, screw that and tell me anyway.”

“See, I’m glad someone appreciates my guns.” You take this opportunity to snicker into your drink. “No, really, you’re the only person on this ship who’s actually willing to listen to me talking about the awesome parts, not just how you can point them at stuff and blow it up.”

“If _I_ had hands, I wouldn’t waste them picking dirt out of my seams.” You point a claw at him, illustratively. “I’d be building all the fancy guns I could think of, like you. Course, I’d probably also know more stuff about building guns if I was gonna do that. The point is I like the mechanisms.”

“Yeah, like that one time when you took that guy apart? That was really cool. I mean, I only heard about it, but I heard it was really cool.” 

“Well, I try,” you say modestly. “Can I see some guns now?”

“Since you asked so nicely, sure. I’ll let you look at my new prototype.” Brainstorm downs the rest of his drink and stands up.

You follow suit, then follow him out of Swerve’s. “Those are the words I’m always dying to hear!”

The prototype is beautiful, like all of Brainstorm’s weapons. Not in that goopy how-majestic-look-at-those-curves way, but in the way that works. You _love_ things that work. Elegant things, like watches: all packed into exactly the amount of space that’s needed. Most Cybertronians are like that too, you think, examining the firing mechanism. It’s a classic, energon propellant working an eight-chambered rotary filled with explosive charges. “What’s so special about it, then? It’s real sleek, sure, but what does it _do_? Besides the obvious.”

“See right here?” Brainstorm points, and you lean in to look. “Adjustable trajectory. I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if you could shoot somewhere _besides_ where you’re pointing the gun? Baffle your friends! Bamboozle your enemies!”

“And then shoot them,” you supply, testing the bearing joint with a claw tip. “Your friends and your enemies, I mean. This is nice.”

“And that’s why you don’t have any friends, Whirl,” says Brainstorm. “You know, I was _going_ to ask you to test it for me—”

“I accept!”

“And then I rethought that, but I can’t actually prevent you from taking it anyway, can I?”

“Absolutely not.” You beam, insofar as that’s possible what with the whole not-having-a-face thing, and pick up the gun. “Does it have a stupid name, like all your other inventions? And when I say stupid, I mean that as a compliment.”

“I was thinking maybe ‘the rotogun,’ but it’s a work in progress. Honestly, coming up with names is much harder than coming up with weapons.”

You pat him on the shoulder, and pick up the rotogun with your other claw. “You’re like an idiot savant, only you’re not actually an idiot at some things.”

“Uh, thanks? Hey, listen, you have an eye for aesthetics, right? I could use your advice on the color sch—”

Brainstorm is interrupted by Rodimus’ loud voice on the PA system. “All right! Who’s ready to kick some skid plate? If the answer is you, please get ready to go because we’re already in orbit around a planet with a Decepticon-occupied moon. We’re leaving in fifteen minutes.”

You sling the rotogun over one shoulder, already on auto-pilot (as it were). “I’ll let you know how it works out, then. Gotta fly!” You throw Brainstorm a cheeky salute and sprint out the door. If not for Ultra Magnus’ blanket ban on flying alt modes in the halls, you would _literally_ fly all the way to the shuttle bay. Not that you’re really big on following Magnus’ rules, but if it means you’re stuck in the brig during a raid, getting there a little bit sooner isn’t worth it.

You miss most of what happens before the shuttles launch because you’re too jittery. You tap the rotogun on your knees, on your shoulder, a couple of times on your face because why not. You play with the rotary mechanism, watching the scope compensate without moving—it’s really quite clever. Everyone gives you a wide berth, because they know how likely you are to shoot them. By accident. 

They all look kind of jumpy, too, and not just because you might shoot them. It’s been almost a week since the last time you got into a totally avoidable battle, and the whole crew has been waiting for it to happen again. Unless you’re just projecting your feelings on them, which is unlikely given that anyone _sane_ would be ecstatic to get into more gratuitous fights.

Also anyone insane, if they happen to be you. You have no delusions about what everyone thinks of you: totally psychotic, amazing at parties, and the worst possible friend unless you’re currently trying to scrap someone. And that’s how you like it.

The five minutes you sit in the shuttle bay, not even pretending to listen to Rodimus’ briefing, are torture. And you know torture. You’ve been tortured plenty of times, and _not doing anything_ is way worse than actual torture. So you spring up slightly before he finishes his speech and shout, “Let’s go!”

Rodimus really doesn’t like to be cut off, but he’ll just have to deal with it because everyone else shouts their agreement, and then you’re _finally_ off. 

You and the rest of the fliers leap out as soon as the shuttles have covered a reasonable amount of atmosphere, and start spotting for ‘Cons below. They’ve seen you, but haven’t had any time to prepare, which is the best possible scenario in your opinion. They look scared.

You take this opportunity to transform and practice with the rotogun in freefall, picking off a couple of the ones that are trying to run away—there’s no point killing the ones that look like they’ll stand and fight, because then you couldn’t fight them later. Finally someone gets it together and starts returning fire, so you go back to your alt mode to regain maneuverability. You do a couple of strafing runs at first, but the heaps of junk all over this scrapyard of a moon keep getting in the way. That’s all right. You like ground combat just fine.

As it turns out, you end up using your normal guns for most of your murdering needs. The rotogun is great for standoffs, but aiming it takes precious time and attention, which you don’t have to spare. There is one great moment when a ‘Con sneaks up behind Trailcutter and you get to shoot him without looking away from the other ‘Con you’re shooting with your chest guns, and Trailcutter has this _hilarious_ expression, and later you run over to the poor confused guy with his legs blown off and stab him right through the spark with a piece of debris. It’s really classic.

Mostly, though, you go through them like a laser scalpel through a spark chamber (and you make sure never to use a metaphor if you don’t know exactly what it means). It turns into a kind of game, hunting ‘Cons through the maze of trash.

Later you end up pinned behind a chunk of a bombed-out building, with maybe seven ‘Cons firing at you, though obviously you can’t see them. Your only companion is Rewind, who you’re not entirely sure even owns a gun—in fact, why is he here? He doesn’t seem the type. In any case, you’re feeling generous, so you give him the rotogun. The guy has amazing hearing; he gets a hit every single time he puts a shell over the wall. 

After nobody shoots at you for over fifteen seconds, you poke your head up over the top to see if you can leave yet. There are only three of them left so you charge, spraying bullets out of your chest and screaming in a disconcerting way. You can tell it’s disconcerting because they all start running in the opposite direction.

A moment later you realize they were _actually_ running away because someone just threw a grenade onto the ground about a meter from your feet. You have half a second to decide whether to jump back over the wall or push Rewind (he won’t make it in time, he’s way too small) out of the way—

—you come online briefly, system alarms all blaring in a far-off corner of your head. The world is webbed with cracks and edged with static, and it’s moving. There’s Rewind, unconscious, lying on something purple, and there’s a purple hand holding his legs? Crunching noises surrounded by silence. You go offline.

—

You’re in the medbay. You know this because you can hear that humming sound that’s always going on there, and also because a blurry First Aid is leaning over you, looking kind of worried. “Well, Whirl’s online,” First Aid mutters, makes a tick on a datapad. “How are you feeling?”

“Eh, I’ve had worse.” You sit up. You _try_ to sit up, only when you try to lean on your arm you realize it’s not actually there, and fall over to one side. You check, and the other one’s gone too. “I can see this becoming pretty inconvenient, though. How did I even lose both my arms and not have my cockpit damaged?” You examine it as you struggle to sit up properly; it looks as good as new. Actually, it probably is new.

“We didn’t have time to rebuild everything, so we just went with the most important areas. Namely the ones protecting your spark. But the medbay’s finally emptying out, so we should be able to get to your arms today.”

“Fantastic. I can’t wait to have arms again. Mind you get my claws just the way they were, right?”

First Aid looks a little confused. “Okay. I don’t know why you wouldn’t rather have hands, but I’ll make a note.” Halfway turned around to leave, First Aid stops and turns back. “Oh, and Rewind’s all right. He lost a lot of energon, but Cyclonus found you two in time and brought you back. Actually, Rewind got fixed before almost everyone else because Chromedome made such a fuss about it. He has a tendency to hover, so we finished up on Rewind to get them both out of here.”

Oh, great. It had to be Cyclonus, didn’t it? You slouch back down onto your slab and stare around the room. They haven’t _had time_ to fix your optic, either, so everything still looks fuzzy and cracked. Your legs seem okay, though. A bit charred, but okay. Presumably you could walk out of here and come back later to pick up some arms. You slide off the recharge slab and wobble awkwardly for a few seconds before you remember how to balance. There, that’s not so bad. You walk pretty slowly out of the room, earning a disapproving glance from Ratchet but no orders to come back. So far, so good.

You don’t really appreciate how many corridors are in the Lost Light, or how long they are, until you spend a significant fraction of an hour bouncing off their walls. You kind of have to stand up straight most of the time, because when you tried leaning against the wall the whole way your shoulder made this horrible screeching noise and left scratches and streaks of paint on it.

It wouldn’t be this hard if there weren’t something wrong with your gyros, you decide. Gotta have First Aid take a look at those.

You’re about halfway back to your hab suite when you run into Ammo and Fizzle coming the other direction. They look a lot gloomier than usual, which means that this is a great time to antagonize them. Should cheer them up a bit. Or at least it will cheer you up.

“Hey, guys! Had a good battle, did you? Anyone interesting die?”

Ammo starts forward, but Fizzle puts an arm across his chest. “It’s just Whirl, all right? Whirl does this sort of thing.”

“Yeah? Whirl can shove right off and jump in the oil reservoir. Make sure to leave your head behind,” snarls Ammo. He bats Fizzle’s arm away and starts to pass you like the sensible mech he is. This won’t do!

“Someone you liked a lot, then. Let me see, was it Powerflash? He never was all that good in battle. I can see why he’s dead. That is, presumptively—”

Ammo lunges at you, with Fizzle no longer even trying to hold him back. You go down easy since your balance is shot, and there’s a nasty crunch as one of your legs bends the wrong way. “Watch the cockpit, will you?” you say, trying to kick him off with your working leg. “I just got it refitted.” 

This is probably the wrong thing to say, because Ammo punches you, yes, _right_ in the cockpit, putting a lot of nasty cracks in the windshield. 

When you can make out his face, he looks grief-stricken rather than angry. The idiot is probably taking out his frustration for not being able to save Powerflash on you. Ha! What kind of a loser displaces his emotions onto outside parties like that?? But you quickly stop being able to find it funny. Even if you do have the upper hand here, it sure doesn’t feel like it. Panic starts shutting down subprocessors you would really like to be working, only of course you stop wanting that after they’re all gone. The whole situation is hardly ideal.

It is so far from ideal that your optic starts fizzing, hissing slightly through the cracks from the grenade blast. You can’t get him off—the idiot probably weighs twice as much as you, but you keep scratching at his joints with your foot, hoping to mess up an important wire. It’s useless. The alarms come back on one by one: left leg inoperable, damage to guns, guidance systems shutting down for self-repair. You start to thrash like you could possibly throw him off, sending signals to your arms and guns that they can’t carry out.

After about two, three minutes (your internal chronometer’s on the fritz now, too) Fizzle says, “That’s enough,” and pulls Ammo away by the arm.

“You want to come back and finish me off?” you try to say, but most of what comes out is static. You guess you must have missed the ‘severe damage to voice box’ warning with all the other ones going on. They don’t hear you or they ignore you, and disappear down the corridor, Fizzle’s arm around Ammo’s shoulders. You lie in a small pool of your own energon, which is probably going to congeal soon, but your mind is clearing. There’s no way you’ll be getting up now, though, so you send First Aid a data packet.

_message begins/hey can you come pick me up [location ping]/message ends._

First Aid sighs (at least your audio receiver is still working, hey?) and says, “What did you do, Whirl? You’ve literally been out of the medbay for ten minutes.”

_message begins/I was just minding my own business honest and these two huge guys just came at me for no reason/message ends._

“Try not to get into any more trouble before I get there.”

You don’t get into any more trouble. You receive a vicious kick from someone walking by, who you don’t see—you’ve put your optic offline because it was making you dizzy. You hear someone else’s footsteps but they don’t stop. They must figure you deserve it, which is pretty fair. 

First Aid turns up, and sighs again on seeing you. “You really have a gift. Just so you know, I’ll have to carry you to the medbay in my root mode.” You feel yourself lifted and slung over First Aid’s shoulder. You can make out a muttered, “Still, you could be a lot heavier. Not having arms certainly helps.”

You’re quiet on the way back to the medbay, if only because you’re incapable of normal speech. However, introspection is for losers, so you imagine Ammo being sad alone in his hab suite and punching the walls. It feels good to make other people angry, although sometimes it does result in getting completely slagged.

You know you’ve reached your destination when you hear Ratchet say, “Incredible. I was just thinking that I should not have unleashed you on the ship.”

_message begins/excuse me am I the only one who thinks I’m the wronged party here/message ends._

“Yes,” they both say. That’s okay. Exasperation is better than pity any day, and a lot more entertaining.

“Anyway,” says Ratchet as First Aid sets you down on a recharge slab, “you are definitely not leaving the medbay again until I clear you. I’m willing to bet that you sustained a lot more injuries—just look at what you’ve done to your cockpit! First Aid did an excellent job on that last time. The least you could do is take care of it.”

_message begins/reminder I didn’t do this to myself were you even listening/message ends._

“Sorry to make you start over again, First Aid. I’ll do the arms if you want.”

“Thanks, Ratchet. That’d be great. I still have to reconstruct five other limbs and Ammo’s just put in a request for a… paint touch-up? Really? Does he not think I have better things to do?”

You let out a long burst of static instead of laughing. _message begins/you should put him at the front of the queue so I’ll still be here when he turns up/message ends._

“Very funny, Whirl. I hope you know you’ve set me back several hours on all the other repairs I’m supposed to be doing. I’ll just do a quick patch job on your vitals and get back to you later.”

You’ve noticed that you’re almost always the last one in the medbay after a battle, and always the last one to come online. You could begin to think that the medics don’t _like_ you very much.

Ammo’s new paint job is apparently higher priority than whatever Ambulon’s doing, because he comes in only an hour later. You static-laugh quietly to yourself as you hear them talking, because Ambulon is the last person anyone in their right mind would pick to touch up their paint. Maybe Ammo will have a hideous purple spot that doesn’t match the rest of him and everyone at the funeral will think it’s from actual fighting.

He stops by your recharge slab on his way out (you can tell his footsteps because he’s bigger than any of the medics) and just stands there for a while. First Aid must think he’s worried about you or something, because you hear, “Whirl will be fine in a day or two.”

“That’s a shame,” says Ammo, and leaves. You imagine him saying, should have done a better job, and laugh again.

—

You open and close your new claw experimentally. It’s slightly nicer than the last one, probably because the joints aren’t full of grime yet. You still don’t have your rotors back, but you think Ratchet was pleased your arms are so easy to build. Pit, if you’d had arms, you could probably have built your _own_ arms.

Other than that, you’re pretty much fine. First Aid declined to repair your guns, which is understandable, and some segments of your left leg don’t have any paint yet, but overall you feel pretty good. You even got to flip over one of Brainstorm’s worktables when he said you deserved what happened, which is basically the epitome of feeling pretty good. Now you’re hiding from him at the oil reservoir, because if you get injured again you’re pretty sure the medics will just refuse to fix you at all.

You hear whispering behind you, and don’t turn to look because maybe you’ll catch something interesting while they don’t know you’re listening in.

“What should we do?” Sounds like Swerve. “ ‘S just sitting there.”

“Whirl’s not all bad,” whispers Tailgate. “There was this one time… uh…”

“This one time that Whirl saved my life, remember? Gave me a jumpstart when Chromedome couldn’t pull it off.”

“Yeah, but, uh, also gave me that gun that I blew my face off with.”

“I’m pretty sure you can’t blame Whirl for that, Swerve.”

“I disagree,” says Rewind. “Whirl clearly should have known that Swerve should under no circumstances be allowed to use a gun of any kind.”

“Excuse me?”

“Ask Rung. I’m sure he’ll tell you the same.”

“Low blow, Rewind!” 

They start to scuffle outside the door until Tailgate says, “I’ll go in.”

“What?”

“I’ll see what’s up. I’m trained to be courageous. Throw myself on grenades, that sort of thing.”

“Throwing yourself on a grenade is one thing,” whispers Swerve. “Throwing yourself on _Whirl_ is way more dangerous.”

But he’s too late, because Tailgate’s footsteps are already echoing through the large room. You turn as Tailgate draws even with you, wearing, you can now see, a rather poorly disguised expression of nervousness. “Hi, Whirl! I see you’re, er, hanging out?”

You chuckle and pat the ground next to where you’re sitting. “Dear, dear Tailgate.”

“…Yes?”

“Nothing. I just like the sound of it. You could definitely describe what I’m doing as hanging out.” Behind you there’s the distinct sound of a muffled gasp and Swerve getting punched in the arm.

Tailgate sits down cautiously a few feet away, legs swinging against the edge of the floor. “So do you usually hang out at the oil reservoir? I’ve not seen you here before.”

“Nah, I’m hiding from Brainstorm. I lost his gun and flipped over his favorite table or something and I’m hoping he doesn’t know this room exists. Not like he ever leaves his lab, right?”

“I don’t know him very well, but I have heard some things…”

“Go on, then. If there’s any gossip I can hold over his head I want to know about it.”

Tailgate giggles, which is kind of confusingly adorable. First of all, you shouldn’t be able to feel the emotion of “adorable” (that’s probably not an actual emotion, but whatever). You have two emotions, rage and bitterness, with a very occasional and mystical third option called pity. Some day mechs will tell their junior teammates of the fateful day Whirl felt kind of bad for Trailbreaker because he was such an enormous pathetic loser. And thus it will pass into legend. 

You suddenly realize that Tailgate has been talking, and dig through your short-term memory for the beginning of the sentence. “Well, a lot of it is about his weird thing for Perceptor.” You nod sagely because this is decades-old news. “But more of it is about his suitcase. Swerve said he would find out what’s in it or die trying.” Faintly, in the background, Swerve whispers, “Oh slag, don’t mention me!”

“The thing is like an urban legend,” you inform Tailgate. “Jackpot has a list of planets people say it blew up. You should ask to see it sometime, it’s pretty neat. But I know for a fact Brainstorm’s never even been to most of ‘em.”

“Wow! Really? How many?”

“The list is like a couple hundred. I’d say the actual number he’s annihilated can’t be more than three or four dozen.” This is a high estimate, but it’s worth it to watch Tailgate’s visor expand like a tiny energon flood.

“ _Are you serious_?”

You nod solemnly, closing your optic for effect. “Cross my spark, it definitely isn’t more than that.”

Tailgate stares for a while at the dark rippling oil, probably trying to wrap that weird square little head around the idea of Brainstorm destroying multiple planets. Finally: “Do you think Rewind has any of that on film?” Muffled snickering from outside the door; Tailgate glances backward and quickly pretends not to have done so.

“Hey, Rewind,” you shout over your shoulder. “Do you have any video of Brainstorm’s suitcase murdering anyone? ‘Cause if you do it’s probably illegal for you to be alive. But I promise I won’t tell anyone.”

Rewind walks cautiously inside to stand right next to the door, while Swerve is still invisible in the hall. “Even if it were possible to get that footage, it would be way too heavily classified. You might not be aware that I was living in close proximity to Prowl for a couple of months before I joined the Lost Light.”

“And there you have it,” you say to Tailgate. “Rewind is not currently rusting in a cell several miles underground after brutal interrogations by Prowl, so it’s pretty safe to say that he does _not_ have Brainstorm’s briefcase on film.” You stand, pick Tailgate up in the crook of one arm, and continue, “Hey, Swerve, is your bar gonna open soon? We should go get a drink. I feel like getting a drink.”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” says Swerve, trying to pretend he wasn’t just hiding behind the door. “Absolutely, let’s go.”

You run into Cyclonus around the next corner, and without a word he relieves Tailgate from your claws. You stare after them for a moment—the tall dark glitchhead carrying a tiny martial arts champion (or so you’ve heard) by the weird square hood thing—then you shout, “Hey, monohorn, I was using that!”. Cyclonus only turns his head slightly to give you a baleful glare, but that’s his only expression so it might not mean anything. Oh, well, it was worth a shot. 

Tailgate’s protests follow you down the hall: “Cyclonus! What did you do that for? We were just going to get a drink! Whirl’s not all bad, honest, and anyway I can take care of myself…”

You’ve just barely sat down with a glass of engex when a notification buzzes in your head: appointment with Rung. You groan loudly and stand up. “Gotta go talk to the psychiatrist or someone will probably get mad at me. Never a dull moment, huh? I’ll likely bring the glass back later.”

“Hey, bring it back _now_! People keep stealing those and I don’t know where they hide them, and then they complain I don’t have enough glasses. Get back here!”

You raise your glass to the closing door, and drink to easily-intimidated minibots who don’t always notice you failing to pay for high-grade.

You save most of your engex for when you actually get to Rung’s office, even though you could finish it off on the way there. You like the idea of sitting on his stupid couch casually sipping the fancy drink you conned Swerve into giving you. Just playing it cool, like the extremely cool mech you are. 

“Ah, Whirl,” says Rung, looking up from some kind of datawork on his desk. “You’re unexpectedly punctual.”

“It’s bound to happen occasionally, if only by accident,” you say. You sip. 

“I hope you’re not inebriated. Historically, it has made you rather difficult to keep on task.”

You put your drink down on his desk. “Cross my spark, this is the only drink I’ve had. You really gotta ruin everyone’s fun, don’t you?”

“According to its official hours, Swerve’s bar won’t be open for some time.” He looks at you in a way that makes it clear this is a question.

“Yeah, I ran across him and some friends at the oil reservoir—I think it’s where they sit and gossip—and convinced him we should go for drinks. It wasn’t that hard, actually, he was way more terrified of me than usual.”

“You _threatened_ him?”

You wave your claws in front of you in theatrical denial. “Not at all. I have no idea what was up with him. I guess if you find me looking brooding it’s generally best to stay out of my way because it means I want to punch something. That’s my best guess.”

“So you were brooding.”

“Nah, not really. Brainstorm said something mildly rude and I flipped over his table and I thought he was coming to beat me up. Then I’d beat _him_ up and the medics would get mad at me all over again.” Rung doesn’t even have to ask a question; his eyebrows do it for him. “They were mad because they had to repair me again ten minutes after they finished the first go round.”

“Yes, I’d heard. I took the liberty of securing the monitor footage of that fight. Why did you deliberately antagonize Ammo and Fizzle when you knew you were in no fit state to fight back?”

“Antagonize? Me? Perish the thought.” He looks at you until you laugh. “Yeah, I did. It’s really funny watching people get angry. Sad one minute, and then, zhoop, angry! It’s cool how I can do that.”

“You take pleasure in having emotional power over others.”

“Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. Like, I can’t control my own emotions, but at least I can mess with other people’s. You may write that down in your notes,” you add generously.

Rung frowns, but does indeed write it down. “Have you considered trying to… _manipulate_ people into being happy instead?”

“Why’d I want to do that?”

Rung’s exciting eyebrows draw together. “Do you not understand why being happy is a good thing, or do you not understand why you should wish it for others?”

“Both. Like, if I can’t be happy why should anyone else? That’s just not fair. It’s, like, equality, you know? What are the Autobots fighting for?”

“If you used your talents to make people like you, you could have friends. A support structure.”

“What’s that good for, then?”

Rung heaves a deep, exasperated sigh. “Possibly you would have someone to prevent you from being hurt when you can’t defend yourself?” he tries, like he’s aware it probably won’t mean anything to you.

“Getting scrapped isn’t that bad. I’m more worried if I do it too often the medics will stop repairing me and I won’t get to go out and fight. Although, actually, if I had friends I might be able to get in more fights to defend them.” Rung strokes his face with one hand like he’s struggling to find an appropriate response (emotional or verbal) to that. Score one for Whirl.

“What about our friendship?”

“We’re not friends,” you say automatically, although it’s not a denial you have to make very often.

“That’s not what you said when Fortress Maximus had a gun to my head.” You bobble your head a little to indicate _whatever_. “In fact, I believe that you did fight to defend me, albeit in a different way than you normally do. Revealing your past to two people you considered threatening took a lot of courage. More, I suspect, than doing physical battle.”

“I do _not_ consider you threatening,” you say, jabbing a claw at him. “You’re, like, tiny. You don’t even weigh half a ton. _Tailgate_ could probably pick you up.” When Rung doesn’t say anything else, you continue, “I kind of like the idea of being able to fight with words. Usually I just use them to start fights. But this changes everything! I could be fighting literally all the time!”

“That isn’t what I hoped you’d get out of this,” says Rung. The rest of what he’s going to say is interrupted by Drift’s voice on the PA system: “I’m sorry to inform you all that there’s another threat we have to take care of. Not Decepticons, but nothing good, either. Everyone who wants to come should be in the shuttle bay in half an hour.” There’s a pause. “Rodimus isn’t making this announcement because he’s in time out. He didn’t want me to tell you that.” And Drift’s voice clicks off.

You jump up immediately, but Rung puts a hand on your arm. “You can’t seriously be thinking of doing battle in your current state! You can neither transform nor fire any of your weapons.”

“Right,” you mutter, and shake off his hand as you sit back down. “My life is so great.”

“I maintain that it would be better if you tried being nice to people.”

“If I were nice to people, they might be nice to me, and then what on Cybertron would I be angry about?”

“Have you considered not being constantly angry?”

“Yeah, and I know for a fact it’s a horrible idea. Can I leave? I wanna go be angry at someone. Maybe if I’m angry at Ratchet loud enough he’ll give me back my guns.” There’s no point being angry at Rung. He just makes it all weird.

Rung stands up, but it’s not like he can stop you leaving. “Please think about it,” he calls after you.

—

Ratchet does give back your guns and your arm rotors, but not until everyone has already left. You can’t fathom why he’d rather be stuck on the ship with you while you’re able to do battle but not allowed to, but you guess that’s his stupid choice to make. Not that you’re planning to take it out on him; instead you break into Swerve’s bar and see how drunk you can get before you can’t stack the glasses into pyramids any more. Ten empty glasses and two smashed ones later, you admit defeat. Swerve is almost definitely going to figure out it was you.

That’s okay.

You’ve been staring blankly at the ceiling, revelling in not having to think or feel, for over an hour when the first of the raiding party comes back. You vaguely register that they’re covered in mud, and that they don’t sound too pleased. One of them walks into you where you’re lying on the floor and stumbles. 

“Look at this. Fragger was getting overcharged while we were risking our skidplates fighting organics that spew acid.”

“Knowing Whirl, it was probably out of jealousy.”

“Ah, shut your trap, Aquafend. Don’t try and make _Whirl_ relatable. Lemme just have this one kick.”

“I want a kick,” says someone else. You feel the promised kicks, but don’t care enough to react.

“Really out of it.” says someone. “I wonder if…” There’s a pressure on your elbow joint. Reflexively you try to get up, but can’t move much before the foot holds you in place. You hear a kind of awful crunching noise and you can move again. More crunching.

“Pit, whatever. This isn’t even funny. Let’s just get trashed.”

You decide this is a great time to leave, before anyone else turns up to join in. You don’t even try to stand, for reasons you can’t articulate but are probably really good reasons. Instead you pick up some bits that are about the same color as you and start dragging yourself toward the door.

It’s pretty slow, because it turns out to be harder than you thought to balance while lying down. You’re at least out of the main corridor by the time voices start resonating behind you, but you have no idea where you are relative to your hab suite. So you pick a niche and curl up in it, clutching what you register vaguely as severed limbs.

You wake up later with a much clearer head, and take a moment to put together what happened. Well, here are your left arm and leg. More of Ratchet and First Aid’s work down the drain. You decide not to bother them with this until they forget how much they hate you, so you check your location on the OPS and start dragging yourself back toward your hab suite. Maybe you can weld them back on, or something. Do you have a welder you can operate with one claw?

You’re still pondering the mystery of _how bad an idea is it, exactly, to try to weld your limbs back on while inebriated_ when you run into someone’s feet. You tilt your head back and fall over, unable to catch yourself because your right hand is full of your left hand.

“Oh, hey Skids. Have a good battle?”

Skids just kind of stares down at you, looking extremely confused. “Did you… you weren’t there, were you?”

“Nope! These are peacetime casualties. I’m gonna go weld them back on.”

“I hope you realize that’s a terrible idea. They’re not that badly damaged now, but if you set the crushing wounds with heat they’ll be a lot harder to repair.”

“Figures you’d be a welding expert,” you say, and start dragging yourself past him. “Sadly, I don’t have much of a choice. If I ask a medic to do it I’ll probably get murdered.”

Skids sighs the exasperated sigh that you’ve been hearing a lot lately. “Do you need any help getting back to your quarters? It’ll take you days at this rate.”

You ponder this. Pride versus expediency? That’s a tough one. Then you think of Rung and his friendship rubbish, and decide to try it out. “Thanks, Skids. You’re a real pal.” 

He picks you up like you weigh nothing. Between him, First Aid, and Cyclonus you could get used to being carried everywhere. If it weren’t so totally horrible, demeaning, and slightly scary. But it does get you back to your hab suite in short order, which is what matters here. He sets you down on your recharge slab and then hovers uncertainly near the doorway.

“If you want to show me how I _should_ be welding these on,” you say, waving your leg at him, “then be my guest. I know it would just kill me watching someone frag up a thing I know how to do.” And that’s how you use tact to get someone to help you, Rung. It’s called helping people save face, and you’re amazing at it.

Skids nods, shuts the door, and starts looking through your piles of ammunition and spare guns for the welder. You think you hear him laugh quietly, which makes sense because you’re pretty funny.

**Author's Note:**

> I had to avoid using any pronouns at all for Whirl, First Aid, and Tailgate, because of reasons inscrutable even to myself. That's why it's written in second person, fyi--it gets really awkward circumventing the protagonist's pronouns entirely for 6k words.


End file.
